In 2022, the future of green hydrogen in Canada looked bright. At a ceremony in Newfoundland, former prime minister Justin Trudeau and then–German chancellor Olaf Scholz shook hands on an agreement to start exporting green hydrogen – hydrogen produced using wind as the power source – starting in 2025. The destination was to be the European Union, where 10 million tonnes of renewable hydrogen would be imported from Canada’s East Coast to help the bloc achieve carbon neutrality and reduce reliance on Russian natural gas.
For wind-rich Atlantic Canada, the agreement signalled the dawn of a new export industry, as well as a boost to the region’s decarbonization targets; by attracting capital, some analysts said, green hydrogen could help drive regional renewable-energy projects.
But green hydrogen’s lustre has dimmed in recent years. While the EU has committed €200 million to support the development of Canadian renewable hydrogen, the path to commercialization is looking increasingly muddy. In February, the consortium of companies behind the 2022 green hydrogen agreement filed for creditor protection, and in August, one of the German companies that had signed a memorandum of understanding for the offtake of green hydrogen in Nova Scotia – forming part of the basis for the province’s largest wind build-out, as well as a multibillion-dollar export complex – stated it would no longer be moving forward with the deal.
For some analysts, this trajectory points to an inevitable hurdle in the use of green hydrogen as a fuel: these projects often fail to pencil out. The fundamental issue with hydrogen remains its low energy density per unit volume, explains Paul Martin, co-founder of the Hydrogen Science Coalition. Hydrogen takes up a lot of space for the energy it contains, making it difficult and expensive to transport. Even in the industries in which hydrogen is currently used, it is mostly produced on-site rather than transported long distances.
Moreover, converting electricity to hydrogen, making hydrogen storable, and turning it back to electricity results in a roughly 63% loss of the energy put into the process. “You can’t make that go away. It’s structurally inherent to the idea of using hydrogen as a fuel,” Martin says.
Applications still exist
Even so, there may yet be a role for green hydrogen. In Canada, some researchers and communities are investigating green hydrogen as an alternative to diesel. This includes Xaxli’p First Nation in British Columbia, which has plans to build a Xaxli’p-owned green hydrogen utility to produce liquefied hydrogen fuel for remote communities, and the Magdalen Islands, where Hydro-Québec is looking to replace the 66-megawatt diesel thermal plant that generates the islands’ electricity.
Why on earth would you be fussing over the hard-to-decarbonize sectors when you haven’t done the easy ones yet?
– Paul Martin, co-founder, Hydrogen Science Coalition
Jasmin Raymond, professor at the Institut national de la recherche scientifique and a Canada Research Chair in the analysis of sustainable geoenergy systems, says that as the Magdalen Islands integrate more wind, they’ll need a way to store energy for the winter, when energy needs are about 25 megawatts higher than the summer.
Batteries are not a good solution for this kind of seasonal variation, Raymond says. But the islands sit atop massive salt domes, forming salt caverns that could serve as storage space for green hydrogen: “The concept would be to make green hydrogen when you have surplus electricity from the windmills, store it underground in the caverns dissolved in the salt, and use it when you need it.”
Raymond says using green hydrogen in place of diesel is a long-term vision; for the time being, his research has centered on assessing the technical and financial viability of storing hydrogen this way.
Martin is skeptical of green hydrogen’s role in remote communities, where replacing diesel would mean swapping one expensive fuel for another.
Thinking in advance
There may also be a role for hydrogen to replace the 120 million tonnes of fossil hydrogen produced annually for fertilizer, in oil refining and for a grab bag of chemical processes. But doing so would require a customer willing to pay a premium for a low-carbon product, Martin says. The Stegra project in Sweden is Europe’s first green-hydrogen-based steel mill. Steel produced by the mill costs roughly a third more than its conventional counterpart.
Martin suggests focusing on using renewable energy for lower-hanging fruit, like electrifying home heating and transport, before tackling high-emitting industries with green hydrogen. “Why on earth would you be fussing over the hard-to-decarbonize sectors when you haven’t done the easy ones yet?”
In the long term, a range of solutions must be put in play to decarbonize the economy, including investments in energy storage, Raymond says, heightening the importance of investigating green hydrogen for its possible applications in the coming decades. “It’s still a bit early for that technology to enter the market. That said, it doesn’t mean we should not work on it. [With] energy systems, we really need to think in advance.”
Moira Donovan is a Nova Scotia–based journalist who specializes in the environment and climate change.
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